Validating an interlingual metanorm for emotional analysis of texts

In this article, we present a set of 12 norms that characterize emotional terms in French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. The high correlation between the norm values in the two emotional dimensions of valence and arousal suggests an interlingual homogeneity of emotional representations and allows a significant metanorm??EMONORM??to be established with 6,383 terms characterized in valence and 4,345 terms characterized in arousal. This metanorm is a resource for creating experimental materials in studies on language and emotions. Furthermore, we perform three tests using EMONORM, with the objectives of (1) identifying basic emotions from their valence and arousal values, (2) determining the orientation of texts referring to positive and negative emotions, and (3) evaluating the intensity of emotions expressed in texts. The results are highly similar to those for human judgments. Finally, we present EMOVAL/SEMOTEX, a Web application for static and dynamic valence and arousal emotional analysis of texts using EMONORM (http://www.semotex.fr).     

Psychophysiological, behavioral, and cognitive indices of the emotional response: a factor-analytic study

Previous research on the components of the emotional response employing factor analytic studies has yielded a two-factor structure (Lang, Greenwald, Bradley, & Hamm, 1993; Cuthbert, Schupp, Bradley, Birbaumer, & Lang, 2000). However, the startle blink reflex, a widely employed measure of the emotional response, has not been considered to date. We decided to include two parameters of the startle reflex (magnitude and latency) in order to explore further how this response fits into the two-factor model of emotion. We recorded the acoustic startle blink response, skin conductance response, heart rate, free viewing time, and picture valence and arousal ratings of 45 subjects while viewing 54 pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; 18 unpleasant, 18 neutral, and 18 pleasant). Factorizations of all measures gave a two-factor solution (valence and arousal) that accounted for 70% of the variance. Although some measurements, including heart rate change, did not behave as predicted, our results reinforce the two-dimension model of the emotion, and show that startle fits into the model.     

Les effets de l’ingestion aiguë d’alcool sur le jugement d’expressions faciales émotionnelles spontanées et dynamiques

This study is interested in the link between acute alcohol consumption and the perception of dynamic and spontaneous emotional facial expressions (EFE). The noxious effects of alcohol on EFE recognition are now well demonstrated (Attwood et al., 2009a). Studies showed that alcohol drinking impairs the judgment of facial expressions, especially of negative ones (EFE of anger and disgust notably). However, such effects have been observed for the judgment of artificial material (static/posed/morphed/EFE). Yet, everyday EFE are far from the archetypes used in the lab. Therefore, the present study aims at completing previous observations, this time for the identification of dynamic and spontaneous EFE. Dynamic and spontaneous EFE of amusement, interest, irritation, anxiety, and neutral were judged by 63 normal male drinkers. Buck et al.’s (1972) paradigm was adopted since it is recommended for the study of nonverbal behavior in the process of communication ( [Buck, 1990] , [Wagner, 1990] , [Wagner et al., 1986] and [Zuckerman et al., 1976] ). The emotion to be identified is the one self-reported by the EFE sender. On the pretext of tasting drinks, participants were randomly assigned to one out of six experimental conditions. Two conditions are concerned with the nature of the drink (alcohol or non-alcohol drink). Three other conditions relate to the participant's experimentally manipulated belief regarding the nature of the drink (non-alcohol drink, slight alcohol drink, hard alcohol drink). Results confirm the emotion identification impairment due to alcohol usually noted, thus showing that the effects of alcohol are also observed for the perception of spontaneous and natural facial expressions. Indeed, the comparison of participants who drank alcoholic drinks versus those who did not drink alcohol shows that the formers identify less well emotions than the latter. Moreover, results show that beliefs do not play a role in this deficit since participants’ identification errors are not linked to the belief they hold regarding the nature of the drink (with/without alcohol). Finally, the confusion matrix analysis brings to light the existence of recurrent confusions amongst alcoholized participants, confusions that do not appear amongst sober participants. Thus, results show that, to the exception of EFE of amusement, participants who drank alcohol recurrently assess stimuli as displaying anxiety. To conclude, it comes out that acute alcohol drinking alters the capacity to accurately identify spontaneous emotions expressed by faces, which capacity is essential to the smooth unfolding of human interactions.     

Affective norms for 210 British English and Finnish nouns

This article presents affective ratings for 210 British English and Finnish nouns, including taboo words. The norms were collected with 135 native British English and 304 native Finnish speakers, who rated the words according to their emotional valence, emotional charge, offensiveness, concreteness, and familiarity. The ratings between the two languages were found to be strongly correlated. The present ratings were also strongly correlated with the American English emotional valence and arousal ratings available in the Affective Norms for English Words database (Bradley & Lang, 1999) and the Janschewitz (2008) database for taboo words. These ratings will help researchers to select stimulus materials for a wide range of experiments involving both monolingual and bilingual processing of British English and Finnish emotional words. Materials associated with this article may be accessed as an online supplement from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Schémas cognitifs, croyances addictives et défenses dans la consommation et l’addiction au cannabis de jeunes adultes

Theoretical background

Integrating the cognitive approaches based on the model of Beck et al. (1993) information treatment, the Young (1994) model of maladapted schemas, the integrative approach of Plutchik (1995) and the clinical approach based on defense mechanisms (Bond, 1995), this study aimed at investigating: (a) the role of the hyperactivated maladapted schemas, (b) the addictive beliefs, (c) the suractivation of the conscious derives of defensive mechanisms and (d) the relationships between these cognitive and defensive variables, in young people's cannabis intensity addiction.

Method

Forty-four young adults, 25 females and 19 males, have completed a self-reported questionnaire estimating: (a) the intensity of cannabis addiction (Décamps et al., 2008), (b) the Rusinek (2006) adaptation of Young's maladapted schemas and (c) the questionnaire of addictive beliefs of Tison and Hautekeete (1998) and the defensive styles questionnaire of Bond et al. (1983) and Bond (1995). Non-parametric statistical analysis has been conducted on three subject's groups (“non-users”, “users non addicted”, “users-addicted”) to test the implications and the links between hypothesized psychological factors (e.g., schemas, beliefs and defences) in cannabis use intensity.

Results and discussion

The intensity of cannabis addiction is correlated significantly with: (a) an hyperactivation of three maladapted schemas: inadequate autocontrol, dependence and fear of lose the control, (b) a hyperactivation of permissive, anticipatory and relief oriented beliefs and (c) a higher activation of the defence “sublimation” and a lower activation of the “displacement”. “sublimation” is correlated with the global activation of 13 schemas that are correlated with the positive relief-oriented beliefs, which are correlated with the “displacement” defence, which is correlated with the anticipatory beliefs. The results showed that the permissive beliefs have the power to differentiate the “non-consumption”, the “consumption without addiction” and “the addiction” to cannabis. Our interpretation displays that greater attention to the dysfunctional beliefs will be required in future researches and should be essential targets in cognitive therapy of this substance use disorder.     

Affective ratings of sound stimuli

This article present the Spanish assessments of the 111 sounds included in the International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS; Bradley &; Lang, 1999b). The sounds were evaluated by 159 participants in the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance, using a computer version of the Self-Assessment Manikin (Bradley &; Lang, 1994). Results are compared with those obtained in the American version of the IADS, as well as in the Spanish adaptations of the International Affective Picture System (P. J. Lang, Bradley, &; Cuthbert, 1999; Moltó et al., 1999) and the Affective Norms for English Words (Bradley &; Lang, 1999a; Redondo, Fraga, Padrón, &; Comesaña, 2007).     

The effect of content and physical properties of affective pictures on emotional responses

The aim of this research was to study the influence of both the emotional content and the physical characteristics of affective stimuli on the psychophysiological, behavioral and cognitive indexes of the emotional response. We selected 54 pictures from the IAPS, depicting unpleasant, neutral, and pleasant contents, and used two picture sizes as experimental conditions (120 x 90 cm and 52 x 42 cm). Sixty-one subjects were randomly assigned to each experimental condition. We recorded the startle blink reflex, skin conductance response, heart rate, free viewing time, and picture valence and arousal ratings. In line with previous research (e.g., Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert, and Lang, 2001), our data showed an effect of the affective content on all the measurements recorded. Importantly, effects of the size of the affective pictures on emotional responses were not found, indicating that the emotional content is more important than the formal properties of the stimuli in evoking the emotional response.     

Effets de l’expression écrite d’un événement positif et négatif sur le niveau d’anxiété d’étudiants de différentes disciplines

This study concerns the field of writing and its influence on the emotional state of writers (Pennebaker, 2002). In this field of research, participants are usually requested to express their feelings and emotions following the occurrence of negative events. It is thus important to collect data concerning the influence of positive experiences. By contrast, our study aimed at exploring the impact of expressive writing in two opposite contexts. One context concerns a negative experience (exam's failure) and the other context refers to a positive experience (exam's success). Expressive writing is usually studied in relation to mental (mostly depression) and physical health of the participants. The impact of expressive writing affect on the writers’ anxiety has more rarely been investigated. This is the reason why we have examined the effect of writing on the levels of anxiety of writers. Writing expertise has also been shown to depend on academic disciplines. To fulfill these different goals, undergraduate students (n = 119) belonging to three different university discipliones (arts, sciences and psychology students) responded to the S-Anxiety scale and when then required to write about their feeling concerning the positive or negative topics. The level of anxiety was again measured afterwards. The main question under investigation is to know if emotion regulation (in the sense of Lepore et al., 2002) would vary as a function of the nature of the described event. We hypothesize that variations in anxiety would depend on these events and that impact of emotional regulation would also differ according to the students’ curses. The results show that sciences students are not as verbose (measures in terms of verbal volume) than arts and psychology students. Moreover, emotional content of writing has been analyzed with Emotaix-Tropes (Piolat and Bannour, 2009a). Whatever the course, students produced both positive and negative lexicon for the two topics. However, positive lexicon was proportionally more important in the Success and an inverse result was observed in the Failure situation. The anxiety level was higher following the use of negative valence lexicon and was lower following the use of lexicon of positive valence. The short term beneficial effect of disclosure is thus not observed in case of a negative event. In addition, students with a scientific curse showed more variations in their emotional state.     

Impact des contraintes linguistiques et cognitives sur l’acquisition de l’accord en genre de l’adjectif en français écrit

The aim of this research is to show the impact of linguistic (the feminine inflexion was audible or not) and cognitive (the complexity of the task in which the agreement is realized) factors about the acquisition and the use of adjectival gender inflexions in written French. In this perspective, we compared the production of the mark of the agreement in three tasks not mobilizing the same levels of linguistic treatment: transcribe sentences under dictation, recall sentences presented orally, and produce two sentences ending with an adjective from a syntactical priming. The results show that the systematic application of the adjectival agreement in gender is not totally mastered at the end of primary. Besides, the use of the adjectival gender inflexions is more difficult when the written inflexion is mute. Finally, the children forgot more the gender inflexion in written production task than in a dictate or recall task. These results are interpreted within the framework of a functional approach of language production.     

The Spanish adaptation of ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words)

This article presents the Spanish adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999). The norms are based on 720 participants' assessments of the translation into Spanish of the 1,034 words included in the ANEW. The evaluations were done in the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Apart from these dimensions, five objective (number of letters, number of syllables, grammatical class, frequency and number of orthographic neighbors) and three subjective (familiarity, concreteness and imageability) psycholinguistic indexes are included. The Spanish adaptation of ANEW can be downloaded at www.psychonomic.org.     

An increase in stimulus arousal has differential effects on the processing speed of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli

The arousal value of a stimulus influences its salience, whereby higher arousal should lead to faster processing. However, in previous research, participants consistently made faster valence judgments for low arousal, pleasant stimuli than for high arousal, pleasant stimuli. The speed of valence and arousal judgments for pictures and words were investigated in three experiments. Valence judgments were faster for low arousal than for high arousal pleasant pictures and for high arousal than for low arousal unpleasant pictures and words. Moreover, arousal judgments were faster for low arousal than high arousal pleasant and for high arousal than low arousal unpleasant pictures and words. The current research confirms that the impact of valence and arousal on processing speed does not reflect on the labels (valence versus arousal) used when recording speeded judgments. Similarly to valence, stimulus arousal interacts differentially with the evaluation of pleasant and unpleasant stimuli producing a processing advantage for high arousal, unpleasant stimuli but not high arousal, pleasant stimuli.     

Event-related potentials of emotional memory: encoding pleasant,unpleasant, and neutral pictures

Emotional events tend to be remembered better than nonemotional events. We investigated this phenomenon by measuring two event-related potential (ERP) effects: the emotion effect (more positive ERPs for pleasant or unpleasant stimuli than for neutral stimuli) and the subsequent memory effect (more positive ERPs for subsequently remembered items than for subsequently forgotten items). ERPs were measured while subjects rated the emotional content of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral pictures. As was expected, subsequent recall was better for pleasant and unpleasant pictures than for neutral pictures. The emotion effect was sensitive to arousal in parietal electrodes and to both arousal and valence in frontocentral electrodes. The subsequent memory effect at centroparietal electrodes was greater for emotional pictures than for neutral pictures during an early epoch (400-600 msec). This result suggests that emotional information has privileged access to processing resources, possibly leading to better memory formation.     

Influence of emotional valence and arousal on the spread of activation in memory

Controversy still persists on whether emotional valence and arousal influence cognitive activities. Our study sought to compare how these two factors foster the spread of activation within the semantic network. In a lexical decision task, prime words were varied depending on the valence (pleasant or unpleasant) or on the level of emotional arousal (high or low). Target words were carefully selected to avoid semantic priming effects, as well as to avoid arousing specific emotions (neutral). Three SOA durations (220, 420 and 720 ms) were applied across three independent groups. Results indicate that at 220 ms, the effect of arousal is significantly higher than the effect of valence in facilitating spreading activation while at 420 ms, the effect of valence is significantly higher than the effect of arousal in facilitating spreading activation. These findings suggest that affect is a sequential process involving the successive intervention of arousal and valence.     

Negation as a means for emotion regulation? Startle reflex modulation during processing of negated emotional words

This study investigated startle reflex modulation in 33 healthy student participants during the processing of negated emotional items. To build upon previous research, our particular interest was to find out whether processing of negated emotional items modulates emotional responding in line with the logical meaning of the negated expression, or instead leads to paradox emotional effects that point in the direction opposite the one logically implied by the negation. Startle reflex modulation was assessed during silent reading of pleasant and unpleasant nouns. The nouns were either paired with the possessive pronoun my or with the negation word no. The startle eyeblink amplitude was enhanced during processing of the unpleasant pronoun–noun phrases and attenuated during processing of the pleasant phrases. Negation attenuated the startle eyeblink for negated unpleasant nouns and enhanced it for negated pleasant nouns. In line with this finding, negation decreased arousal ratings for unpleasant nouns and reversed the valence ratings for pleasant nouns. Our results are the first to show an effect of negation on both peripheral physiological and subjective indices of affective responding. Our results suggest that negation may be an effective strategy for spontaneous down-regulation of emotional responses to unpleasant, but not to pleasant, stimuli.     

Reaction time normative data for the IAPS as a function of display time, gender, and picture content

This study aimed to extend the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2005) norms by obtaining reaction time (RT) normative data for 308 selected photographs. Pictures were presented one at a time for 33, 100, or 250 msec, or under free-time display, to 96 women and 48 men. The participants’ task involved assessing the emotional valence of each picture and responding as quickly as possible as to whether it was unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant. RTs provided an index of processing efficiency. The manipulation of display time served to estimate the time course in the valence identification of each picture. Some categories of depicted scenes (e.g., erotica and mutilations) were classified more consistently and efficiently than were others as pleasant or unpleasant. There were minimal differences between men and women. Overall, the present data provide researchers investigating cognition/emotion relationships with an objective criterion to select pictorial stimuli on the basis of RTs. Data for all pictures may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Friendly drug-dealers and terrifying puppies: Affective primacy can attenuate the N400 effect in emotional discourse contexts

Words that are semantically congruous with their preceding discourse context are easier to process than words that are semantically incongruous with their context. This facilitation of semantic processing is reflected by an attenuation of the N400 event-related potential (ERP). We asked whether this was true of emotional words in emotional contexts where discourse congruity was conferred through emotional valence. ERPs were measured as 24 participants read two-sentence scenarios with critical words that varied by emotion (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral) and congruity (congruous or incongruous). Semantic predictability, constraint, and plausibility were comparable across the neutral and emotional scenarios. As expected, the N400 was smaller to neutral words that were semantically congruous (vs. incongruous) with their neutral discourse context. No such N400 congruity effect was observed on emotional words following emotional discourse contexts. Rather, the amplitude of the N400 was small to all emotional words (pleasant and unpleasant), regardless of whether their emotional valence was congruous with the valence of their emotional discourse context. However, consistent with previous studies, the emotional words produced a larger late positivity than did the neutral words. These data suggest that comprehenders bypassed deep semantic processing of valence-incongruous emotional words within the N400 time window, moving rapidly on to evaluate the words’ motivational significance.     

Emotional reactivity and force control: the influence of behavioral inhibition

Individual difference measures have been shown to alter emotional arousal and emotional arousal alters force production during force control tasks. In the current study we examined whether individual differences in behavioral inhibition influence force control during emotional image viewing. Subjects who scored high and low in behavioral inhibition (BIS) produced force with visual feedback for 5 s. Feedback was then removed and replaced by a mutilation, attack, erotica, or neutral image for 6 s. The magnitude and direction of error in force production during image presentation was compared between groups and across image type. The high BIS group displayed a relative increase in force production during exposure to attack and mutilation images compared to the low BIS group. Bias scores (i.e., comparison of unpleasant image to neutral or pleasant image) further confirmed these findings by demonstrating a relative increase in force for the high BIS group during attack and mutilation images as compared to erotica images, whereas the low BIS group displayed the reverse effect. Together these findings extend the premise of action readiness to demonstrate that dispositional differences in behavioral inhibition interact with emotional state to alter force production.     

Multidimensional normative ratings for the International Affective Picture System

The purpose of the present investigation was to replicate and extend the International Affective Picture System norms (Ito, Cacioppo, & Lang, 1998; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999). These norms were developed to provide researchers with photographic slides that varied in emotional evocation, especially arousal and valence. In addition to collecting rating data on the dimensions of arousal and valence, we collected data on the dimensions of consequentiality, meaningfulness, familiarity, distinctiveness, and memorability. Furthermore, we collected ratings on the primary emotions of happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. A total of 1,302 participants were tested in small groups. The participants in each group rated a subset of 18 slides on 14 dimensions. Ratings were obtained on 703 slides. The means and standard deviations for all of the ratings are provided. We found our valence ratings to be similar to the previous norms. In contrast, our participants were more likely to rate the slides as less arousing than in the previous norms. The mean ratings on the remaining 12 dimensions were all below the midpoint of the 9-point Likert scale. However, sufficient variability in ratings across the slides indicates that selecting slides on the basis of these variables is feasible. Overall, the present ratings should allow investigators to use these norms for research purposes, especially in research dealing with the interrelationships among emotion and cognition. The means and standard deviations for emotions may be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Relationships between hostility, affective ratings of pictures, and state affects during task-induced stress

The authors examined the relationship of hostility with (a) affective ratings of pictures and (b) state affects evoked by task-induced stress in 95 healthy men and women 22-37 years of age. Pictures were from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; P. J. Lang, M. M. Bradley, & B. N. Cuthbert, 1999). Stressors included a startle task, mental arithmetic task, and choice-deadline reaction time task. The circumplex model of affect was used to structure the self-reported state affects. The authors found that hostility was associated with displeasure, high arousal, and low dominance ratings of IAPS pictures. Hostility was related to unpleasant affect and unactivated unpleasant affect during the experiment, and subscale paranoia was related to activated unpleasant affect. Findings suggest that participants scoring high on hostility are prone to negative emotional reactions.     

Accelerative and decelerative effects of hedonic valence and emotional arousal during visual scene processing

Perceptual processing of natural scene pictures is enhanced when the scene conveys emotional content. Such “motivated attention” to pleasant and unpleasant pictures has been shown to improve identification accuracy in non-speeded behavioural tasks. An open question is whether emotional content also modulates the speed of visual scene processing. In the present studies we show that unpleasant content reliably slowed two-choice categorization of pictures, irrespective of physical image properties, perceptual complexity, and categorization instructions. Conversely, pleasant content did not slow or even accelerated choice reactions, relative to neutral scenes. As indicated by lateralized readiness potentials, these effects occurred at cognitive processing rather than motor preparation/execution stages. Specifically, analysis of event-related potentials showed a prolongation of early scene discrimination for stimuli perceived as emotionally arousing, regardless of valence, and reflected in delayed peaks of the N1 component. In contrast, the timing of other processing steps, reflected in the P2 and late positive potential components and presumably related to post-discriminatory processes such as stimulus–response mapping, appeared to be determined by hedonic valence, with more pleasant scenes eliciting faster processing. Consistent with this model, varying arousal (low/high) within the emotional categories mediated the effects of valence on choice reaction speed. Functionally, arousal may prolong stimulus analysis in order to prevent erroneous and potentially harmful decisions. Pleasantness may act as a safety signal allowing rapid initiation of overt responses.